"In case you are living under a rock, IE9 Beta was released today. This browser is a major update to the previous version IE8. It is also supposed to give Firefox/Chrome a run for its money. How did it turn out? Read below to find out.

So what are the best features of IE9? Lets give it a quick run-through then we are going to look at a few key features and a benchmark (note the benchmark is against a beta – so things may change).

Hardware accelerated HTML5 Support : This is absolutely the biggest reason to upgrade to IE9. This includes the new H264 Video Support, SVG and CSS3.
Brand new JavaScript Engine: Called Chakra. This will run on a separate core and allow you to render JavaScript faster.
DirectX Video Acceleration – This will use less of the CPU to render video. So far it has smoked Google Chrome while playing 2 720p videos at once.
Developers Tools added. Just hit F12 to access the tools.